


Good Days And Bad Days

by wishwellingtons



Category: Thick of It (UK)
Genre: Hospitals, Illness, M/M, abuse of Olly but that's what he's for, graphic violent & sexual imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-06
Updated: 2012-05-06
Packaged: 2017-11-04 23:06:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/399201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set well after the end of Series 3. Tom Davis's Cambridge ex-girlfriend is causing problems for the government, and although things have been good for the Scottish mafia, they're about to get very, very much worse. Don't read this if you're likely to be upset by any of the following (not all occurr during the fic, but all are explored in detail): m/m content, obscenity, violence, character death, abortion, crude humour, misogyny, poof jokes and sizeism. But then, you all watch The Thick of It anyway. This fic comes in at about 7,500 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Days And Bad Days

There are the days which would be been good even if they weren't fucking. Days when Malcolm is drawn from sleep by an inexplicable, bizarre embrace - a Scottish octopus sliding its arms all around him and grafting itself onto his back.   
  
"The fuck?" Malcolm asks groggily, and Jamie's fetid, insistent explanation is funny enough that Malcolm doesn't move, except to close his eyes again. Falling asleep is never easy for him, and so he has to lie for a while, while the darkness strikes, until sleep sneaks up unobserved. He has never been able to wait for anything, but those moments - in Jamie's arms, Jamie's known weight against him, familiar breath at his shoulder- are spent in a more passable place than most.  
  
There are the days which are good _because_ they're fucking; because Malcolm can corner Olly, his lily-livered fucktoy, in the corner of some open-plan nightmare and establish in letters of fire the eternal truth that Olly _will_ purchase an Argos diamond for Emma and bring back the Opposition budget and the name of the fucker who leaked the Watford expenses. Because Jamie can watch and share with vicious, vicious glee, but at the same time he's chronicling the older man's body heat, his hands, hips, cock, sure in the knowledge that in five minutes' time he can say the words guaranteed to get Malcolm fucking him over the men's toilets. Because a resignation or scandal or the leaden evidence of Nicola's unfitness for the top job are all surmountable barriers.  
  
***  
  
And then there are the days which are bad even though they're fucking: nights, actually, mainly; carved out of other projects, when they _are_ working but when ley lines and cables have been crossed semi-chaotically, as if there's an extra battle worth fighting. As if elbows on desks and shared greasy paper can mean anything beyond more gaffes and more spin and another reason for the world to hate Malcolm more.   
  
Malcolm, usually the architect of these nights (which seem to him to run on symbology: a weird, emotional Freemasonry enacted by a common thug), sends Jamie on numerous canal-dragging missions, and sometimes hates him so much he could scream. On those nights, every wire in Malcolm's mechanism is showing; there's cheap electricity in the air, and the suggestion his eyeballs might burst. By the time the cleaners get in, he looks all of his age.  
  
By the time he sees Jamie it's three or four in the morning and although he's summoned Jamie and Jamie always proves useful, Malcolm always looks devastated and disgusted when he actually turns up. Like he asked for James Bond and got sent Jeremy Kyle.  
  
Don't make a mistake: Jamie still fucking loves it. Overall. Hearing Malcolm shout his name down a corridor, being brought in as the cut-throat cavalry at the witching hour of sewer rats; co-ruling a megalomaniac's empire of electronic beeps and hate -- this is, in a fucked-up way, just why he wanted to go into politics. He has become the man Malcolm never has to listen to, because he's always - innovatively, forcibly, floridly - on message. He can force a metaphor of ultra-violence into every other sentence; he can redistribute 'cunt' as one of seven parts of speech. He comes in younger and tougher and madder-eyed than Malcolm remembers being _ever_ (the key word is 'remembers'), and their common hatreds bind them even closer than before.  
  
But the bad days, overall, end badly _because_ they're fucking. Because they're fucking and Malcolm's fifty-one, or because they're fucking and Malcolm's heart's not in it, or because when Malcolm sits on the dipping bed with a certain kind of exhaustion, there's no place for Jamie inside his whirling head. It's full of Tom Davis's marital problems, and the budget, and what Newsnight'll say about Jo Langley. He'll drop his head in his hands, and Jamie has to sit and watch while Malcolm recedes beyond his reach.   
  
It only lasts until Malcolm reaches the despairing state where he's prepared to send up the physical signals of surrender: yes, he'll take a sleeping pill. He will make a concession to the eighteen cups of coffee and the black spots in front of his eyes. He will take off his tie before passing out. Malcolm clawing his way into catatonia is not new. Jamie has seen this all before; he's deplored this and worse amongst the vicissitudes of Malcolm's behaviour.   
  
But it's worse now because they're fucking; because Jamie still wants him, but can't coax or coerce him into response. Because when Malcolm puts his head against Jamie's arm, it's with loathing: of himself, and of the bed, and the whole sorry situation. Jamie can never quite come to terms with sharing a duvet with Malcolm Tucker; it's in the moments like this that the situation really catches up with him. But Malcolm is still there, after all, head against his arm; one hand beneath the pillow, or rubbing fretfully at his left arm. The dosage he's just taken ought to stun a horse.  
  
Jamie is years away from the priesthood but he doesn't find it difficult to conjure up a reckoning.  
  
A political reckoning, that is One where it's easy to imagine the gun-trained, blood-red retribution he, Jamie, would inflict on the grasses. Malcolm falls asleep with his head silvered in the moonlight; Jamie dreams of dismembering anyone who'd hurt them.   
  
***  
  
Easy to wake up feeling better, as Jamie so often does. Sunlight, coffee, Malcolm on the phone; the first cigarette, and the ineffable privilege of smoking it naked in front of him. It's the only cigarette Jamie smokes indoors without an eviscerating row: he manages it because Malcolm looks at him with eyes that say he's forgotten what else Jamie's _for_ (other than, obviously, lying round Malcolm's bedroom with his cock out). Easy to head for work with Malcolm in Armani and him in his favourite bus-conducting-psycho-anorak, to rock up with a diatribe and watch the little people scatter.  
  
Terrible, though, when one of those good days becomes a bad day and ends up as the worst.   
  
In Malcolm's fifty-second year, Nicola Murray (unintentionally) says something that could be slightly interpreted as slightly racist in the last minutes of a real live radio show.   
  
There's no ten-second-edit or bleeper or suddenly intervening act of God. For added cock-up, the country's still reeling from Foetusgate, three weeks ago, when a tearful, very Catholic and very black Home Secretary admitted to aborting Tom's disabled baby while at Cambridge. Malcolm didn't go to bed that night, and it's him five press conferences and a ninety-hour week to stabilise the situation, since.  
  
***  
  
The switchboard jams, and then Ofcom. Rather than ring any of the secret numbers that hotwire the Press to Malcolm's Blackberry v3.0, Malcolm does something Jamie's never seen him do before: he goes to the DoSAC gents and throws up into a urinal. He's sicker and sicker and goes greyer and greyer, and it's only when Teri Coverley, of all the humiliating bitches, pushes past him and clamps her hand over Malcolm's left arm, at which he is desperately clawing, that Jamie understands what's happening.   
  
Malcolm is having a heart attack, and his expression suggests he is going to die. Jamie sees it clearly for a second before the bathroom fills up and Teri Coverley (of all the irritating bitches) takes over. Fear and irritation. Exactly how Jamie would expect Malcolm to look if he were dying in a DoSAC toilet.  
  
Which, as it turns out twenty minutes' later, he wasn't. Getting Malcolm to hospital requires the kind of blanket-on-head security reserved for despots and royalty, both because there's _no procedure_ and  because Malcolm refuses to go:  
  
1\. He won't go unless nobody he knows he's going (everyone knows; within seconds iPhones are flash and News 24 pays six figures for the coverage).   
  
2\. He won't go unless Julius Nicholson will publically fellate Colin Cole-Whitterley in Transport, as Malcolm understands he used to do at Eton (at this point Julius goes the colour of vaginas and shouts for everyone shuts off their phones).  
  
2\. He won't go unless he can walk there himself. He can't get up off the floor, though, and it's not until Jamie charges in and says _listen, Castro, we'll put a wig on a blow-up doll_ or _I'll put my fingers up Tom's arse and noone'll know the fucking difference_ , that some of the colour comes back to both their faces.   
  
Soon afterwards, Jamie finds himself holding Ollie by the throat with one hand and helping Malcolm's Blackberry into the ambulance with the other. Malcolm manages to prise the oxygen mask off his face for a moment, and Jamie's not stupid enough not to know what it'll be. He promises to brief the fuck out of them, then stands for a single awkward second staring at Malcolm's spidery fingers, before the paramedics replace the mask and he's gone.  
  
Glenn is better in this situation than Jamie would have expected; he gets Jamie back inside as tenderly and unobtrusively as if Jamie were a shirtlifting MP, and Jamie feels a tinge of admiration for the sad old git. Not unmixed with pity for himself.

 

***

They all go back into the office and Jamie gives a performance that'd make Cal Richards cry. At times he is close to screaming; he throws a stapler across everybody's heads and it shatters on the door. By the end of the worst quarter-hour in DoSAC's history (life, as Malcom might have said, is just a series of bad fifteen minutes), a shit department in a shitstorm has become the epicentre of a political renaissance: the Malcolm Tucker era, reborn in Jamie, who will indeed let Lord Suck-off of Snowdome call him 'James' if it gets the job done.

The third broken chair nets them a strategy. It's pure Malcolm.

The radio presenter's career will fold. Everyone in Government will get on the phones and praise Nicola like she's the dead mother of their crippled kids. And Jamie's sister (heads turn at this, heads not too terrified to stop spinning) will write a fucking pink-ribbons editorial complaining about Nicola's persecution at the hands of a misogynist media. Jamie beams like a lunatic when he says this, then hotfoots it back to Downing Street to spend the rest of the day pissing hot hubris all over a political bonfire. The rest of DoSAC (in a moment of mindless terror, Jaie decides to ship across Olly Reeder, Glenn and Teri, not becuase they're competent but because he wants to keep the weakest closest and rattle the rest) spend it hand-holding the weepy Oxbridge flotsam who wander in and out of the offices looking like their world's imploded. It's like a Romanian orphanage at liberation: bewildered fucking frontbenchrs, who noone'll ever want, stagger about, wanting to know what the future holds. It's a far fucking cry from Tucker's sacking: now, they've _all_ been out into the brave new world and they already know they don't like it.

When Jamie stands on Malcolm's chair  and bawls at them to stop cringing around like child brides in Colorado, the MPs freeze.  When he goes on to announce that Big Brother is still fucking watching, they're still fully-paid-up members of the Family of Love and the suicide pact will be happening at two, everyone looks distinctly relieved. The last thing, he snarls at them, that they need to do is start fucking thinking for themselves.

When, a little later, Jamie tells Olly that _oi, Andy Pandy, we're going down to the woods today and I'm going to put a knife in the back of your skull_ , it feels just like old times. He finishes with a general injunction to get back to disguising the fact that the PM's fucking legacy will now be two million dead Iraqis and one jar of fetus.

***  
"I should just kill myself, shouldn't I?"

Terri doesn't look up. "If you do, ITN'll definitely lead with those pictures of Malcolm throttling you through the oxygen mask."

"It was bad enough when it was just Malcolm sneaking up on me in toilets and pimping me out to women."

"And you say you're _not_ the new poster boy for the Civil Service Fast Stream?"  Olly makes a vicious face at Glenn.

"Yeah, thanks, now I've got Jamie as well. Instead of having a discussion, he'll just break my head on the mirror, rewire the handdryer so it sucks my colon out through my cock and flush my right bollock down the urinal. And _then_ Malcolm'll come out of hospital, blame me for everything and use the left one as the new trackerball on his mouse."

Glenn looks the most cheerful he has since a man younger than him had a potentially fatal heart attack in his departmental toilets. He considers the full import of Olly's words. "Yes," he nods. "That's exactly what's going to happen."

***

Jamie greets Nicola with hugs and kisses and a forty-five-minute inaudible meeting that both of them refuse to discuss. Nicola is grey and ashen, but she's fit to work and does so, keeping her head down for the rest of the day. Olly would put tungsten rods in his cock to know what's been said but the only other person who knows - Sam - is keeping schtum.1

Jamie doesn't call the hospital or ask anyone to do so. He somehow assumes that he will know if Malcolm's actually dead.

Discovering that Malcolm's four-digit voicemail pin is his, Jamie's, own birthday, is a deeply weird moment Jamie never wants to return to again. Despite this, it's Malcolm's sister (who does exist) ringing in because she's seen it on the telly, that makes this the worst day of Jamie's life.

***

Sam, Jamie has to acknowledge,2 has been astounding. All day, she's brought Jamie files and policy folders and desk keys like she's just been waiting for Malcolm to have a coronary in the DoSAC urinals. This is extremely unlikely, given that Sam's eyes are red, but Jamie can't deal with that while he's opening Malcolm's desk to a waft of cigars and old hate. Not when he finds his own cigarette brand and a spare ashtray there, nestled amongst the takeaway menus and the birth certificate for Peter Mannion's second bastard.

There's a stack of manila envelopes tied together with (fucking hell, the man _was_ born in the 50s) hairy string. Jamie opens the third one with a momentary apprehension it'll be some kind of Captain-Oates-living will, but instead it's the Polaroids of the Shadow Home Secretary as an undergraduate Nazi. His wife is now a leading light in Reform Judaism: Jamie puts his forehead down on the desk and thanks God He's sent a breather. There are already duplicates in .jpeg J-drive and Jamie knows how to access them. It's what Malcolm was telling him when he lifted the oxygen mask.

***

He leaves the office at ten p.m, after eight more hours of hell. Jamie's seen Malcolm have meetings in bathrooms, kitchens, stairwells and (on one occasion) between the panels of a rotating door. Today, he's lived it all.

Gone is the adrenaline kick of being at Malcolm's side, the high Jamie remembers deriving from being collectively indestructible.

Plus, everyone else is stupid and boring.

Locked in the back of a taxi, he realises he has no fucking idea which hospital Malcolm's even _in:_ this means calling Sam, again, and hearing the tiny mosaic sounds of TV and cutlery that suggest she's having a bash at a normal life. Jamie feels like a cross between a Dickensian orphan and an aural pervert, but ithings are suddenly _all right_ because Sam has spoken to Malcolm. And then it's _fucking terrible_ again because that was five hours ago, and Malcolm's been scheduled for surgery since. Jamie is  certain that Malcolm's dead now.

They're calling it a minor attack, a mild coronary; apparently all that arm-clawing and air-clutching and the blood-flecked vomit wasn't as bad as it looked. Teri nearly lost her fingers after calling it "Malcolm's mini heart attack" in conversation with the MoD. It's an insulting, fucking meaningless term when Jamie can see all the worthless godless humanity walking around outside, instead of Malcolm. If he could, Jamie would sacrifice fifty of the uninteresting bastards to make Malcolm live.

Jamie's more tired than he'd like.

The end of the call means hearing Sam's voice shake, which means calling her 'pet' in a hideously awkward approximation of what Malcolm would do, then being unable to breathe for about ten seconds.

The car keeps going, pulling up towards a moderately famous hospital with a rare preponderance of Scottish surgeons. Sweeping through to an entrance fully guarded against the press, not calling ahead suddenly seems like the worst kind of hubris. He can't do it now, partly because they're too close, and partly because if he's confronted by Malcolm's corpse he doesn't know what his reaction'll be, and he doesn't want to give himself any options.

***

In some crazed nod to his Socialist roots, Malcolm's got himself onto an NHS ward with two curtained rooms appended. Jamie  hates the smell of bleached effluent and the fact that he has to walk past Bereavement and three clinics to reach him.

Either someone on the staff has a brain or Malcolm used his Blackberry in the ambulance,3 because there's a single security guard outside the curtained room that must, accordingly, mean Malcolm. Jamie shows his security pass. If the guard either comprehends or is impressed by Jamie's ludicrously high level of clearance, he doesn't show it.

The receptionist has assured Jamie Malcolm is out of ICU, and recovering well without the need for an operation, but Jamie still hesitates before he pulls back the curtain and peers inside.

***

  


He's grateful to Malcolm for not looking too dead. Only pale, and still, and with fucking hateful little sticky things all over his chest. Jamie wants to rip them all off, but that wouldn't be productive, so he draws up a chair and sits down.

There's a bunch of flowers on the side table; heather and laburnum and all that shit he's seen on the sides at Malcolm's house. It's been immaculately arranged by someone who knows Malcolm's taste ('knows Malcolm's taste' leaves two candidates; 'immaculately' cuts that to one. She really is a great PA). There's a sealed white envelope propped against the vase but Jamie doesn't want to look and see if his name's on the card, because if it is, that's terrible.

Jamie is disconcerted to realise, for the first time, that he's watching someone sleep. That it should be Malcolm, usually seen teeth bared, folder clutched, seething with fury and panic and a Blackberry, is a terrible thing.

***

  


Malcolm looks like an effigy, although not one of any saint. He takes a while to wake up.

***

  


Jamie doesn't touch him. He resists the temptation to smoke a fag out the window, and the temptation to go beat someone to death.  
Nevertheless, he's edgy and twitching by the time a rasp of tubing and bedsheets tells him Malcolm is awake.

"You look fucking terrible." Malcolm's voice. Unmistakeable, Audible, but barely. Jamie has to lean in. Pleased with himself, Malcolm's greyish lips twist to a smirk. "Who shat in your duvet?" It's him, albeit a croakier, whey-faced version.  
When Jamie doesn't immediately reply, Malcolm continues,exhaling with the satisfaction of a man who expected to wake somewhere worse. "They say I'll be back in six weeks."

The quality of Jamie's gaze eventually makes Malcolm uncomfortable. At one point, it looks like Jamie's making up his mind to speak, but Malcolm (a suden premonition) stops him, snapping a series of work-related questions that Jamie feels duty-bound to answer. He can see Malcolm wandering, though, as the explanation turns complex. For some reason, that unnerves Jamie more than anything else has done. Malcolm's on really a tonne of drugs, so Jamie loosens his tie and puts his jacket over the back of the chair.

***

  


Anaesthetics and stabilisers can't be fought for very long.

As Malcolm's about to fall asleep again, Jamie takes his hand.   Malcolm doesn't notice.

***

The next night, Malcolm's asleep when he gets there. Jamie fucking hates that, angry with himself for supposing (yet again) that that first glimpse of white sheets and stillness means Malcolm's dead. When he does wake, he's much more lucid and boasting of his own progress and the enormous shitpile he's planning for Steve Fleming.

It's probably nothing, but something in both Malcolm's eyes and the discomforting horror of the job makes Jamie deliriously glad that the man will once again do his own murders, and he makes the mistake of seizing Malcolm's hand before the latter is fully asleep.

Malcolm's alert again immediately; blinking, wary and suspicious, and it takes Jamie five minutes to convince him that the doctors haven't venured some disastrous progrnose. Cross and rattled (and looking, suddenly, fifty-one and more) Malcolm loudly doubts Jamie's abilities to hold the fort for six minutes, let alone six weeks: Jamie responds with the gentle calmness that infuriate Malcolm more than anything in the world.

Malcolm's unfortunate response, however, is both unprintable and unforgivable, leading with a kind of inevitably to the moment when Jamie opines that refusing to hold the hand of a man who's been buggering you for twelve years is the act of a cold-hearted psychopath.

Even Malcolm's Nosferatu impression, jerking upright with a terrifying face and all tubes wailing, can't chasten him. The nurses swarm back in while Malcolm's screaming thank god it's the summer recess because if there were any MPs about Jamie'd have them fucking dogging in the Bryanston NCP. Jamie's last clear image of Malcolm is that of the undead. He gets a midnight voicemail telling him he'd better not fuck up the next 8.30, but he doesn't phone back that night.

In the next few days, Jamie gets an average of fifteen missed calls daily from Malcolm, escalating in obscenity and threats. Jamie plays them back-to-back when work is over, noting that - in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fury - Malcolm's definitely sounding better. He's unlikely to give himself another coronary through sheer temper, and, if he does, hospital is the best place for him. Jamie hears on the grapevine that Malcolm's commandeered every television on the NHS ward, and - when that failed - switched to private in order to watch all news channels at once.

The job is still no fun without Malcolm. It's hard to be Burke as well as Hare. But Jamie doesn't fuck up the 8.30, and he doesn't let Nicholson, or the new Nicholson -- Charles Churchill Dickens Walpole MP, directly descended from all of the above and summarily nicknamed 'The Cunt' -- faze him. It may be summer, but there's a resignation before breakfast on Day Two, and a Newsnight (the last gasp of Radiogate) for Nicola Murray on Night Three. As time passes, Jamie starts to realise why Malcolm actually likes her.

The troops don't need too much rallying. There's a fair amount of glee at Tucker's comeuppance, although not enough that Jamie forgets whose side he's on.

By the morning of Day Five the voicemails have changed to grudging admiration, although the 10 a.m. message stings with a couple of suggestions Jamie hastily actions. He has his first one-to-one with Tom at 10.30; the man is a pillock, and Jamie's too fascinated by the sheer miracle of his twattishness to actively hate him. After that, there are no more messages.

Sam has been bringing him progress reports on a three-hourly basis; brief little medical-soon-to-be-press-statements which Jamie doesn't read. Day Five's one o'clock doesn't arrive, though, and when Jamie (in search of a head to put on a spike) grabs a boxfile as prop and heads off to find her, she's cringing through a call she hastily finishes. Perhaps it's the priest in him, but Jamie's once again convinced Malcolm will die. Sneaking up on Glenn in the break room is almost like fun when he drops a full mug on his foot, but somehow -- it's just not _enough_.

Days 1 to 4 of Jamie's reign were hell incarnate; Day 5, unnervingly, is organised and easy. Jamie makes Robyn Murdoch cry, but, disturbingly, still has a sense of struggling to fill the day. His staff are efficient, Ministers are docile, and it's not until Hermione and My First Harry Potter Fuck Doll wizard their way over from Hogwarts and actually _anticipate_ a late-night request 4 that Jamie realises what's going on. In a nod to political history, he throws a bagel (Olly's) at the office door (Malcolm's), kicks the wastebin over and hijacks a Ministerial car to the hospital.

When he arrives, the drips are gone, but Malcolm's face is bathed in the glow of the televisions, from which he is drawing an unholy lifeblood. He looks like a dessicated zombie, pale bones wrapped in a hospital gown. His nametag slips as he waves Jamie in; his grin is malevolence, not unmixed with anticipation.

Jamie is breathless but  inventive in his fury. Evidently Malcolm's found time, alongside remote-controlling Westminster, to plot a few rejoinders: once Jamie's past "tight-fisted", "Stazi" and "shove a fucking catheter up your cock/remove it through your fucking eye" in his opening invective, Malcolm counters admirably by pointing out that Malcolm was running the fucking country when Jamie was still getting his free school meals.  Malcolm probably personally superintended the policy so miserable little cunts like Jamie could get somewhere in their lives, except Malcolm shouldn't have fucking bothered.

"Tell me, have you still not learnt to distinguish when to deal with a problem and when to shit on it?"

What Malcolm really enjoys about Jamie is that he still homes in on the _unfairness_ of the words, even through their scatalogical and lexical dexterity. Malcolm gets a really big kick out of this, and is grateful to have survived to enjoy a few more. He watches Jamie (who has inadvertently, involuntarily, removed his coat and dropped it onto the bedside chair, proving that Malcolm still has him right where he wants him) work himself up beyond rage to disaster. When Jamie tells Malcolm he's clapped-out, tachycardic fucking history, like Eric Morecambe only _shit,_ Malcolm's genuinely amused, and  he laughs outright when Jamie follows it up with a really fabulous bit of bullshit about how Malcolm's a nobody, he's Joey fucking Bishop, he's Bing fucking Crosby in _High Society_ just before Sinatra tries to get his cock up Grace Kelly - at which, incidentally, Jamie will succeed. He _will_ get his cock up Grace Kelly. And Cheryl Cole, and the Shadow Cabinet, and up the fucking Prime Minister of Great Fucking Britain, and when he's done all Malcolm will have left to suck is the dome of Julius Nicholson's big shiny head.

Malcolm gives him a slow, slow handclap and tells him that Tom's already voiced his concerns. Jamie says yeah, about whether to give Malcolm the silver bullet or just put a stake through his heart. After a ring-off to the PM's two private lines which Malcolm wins and over which he exults, the Director of Communications tells the Acting Director of Communications he'll be unemployed by Christmas: in response, the Acting Director of Communications5 says in no uncertain terms that he hopes Malcolm will be dead first.

It's a surprise to both of them that their relationship can still reach new lows. This, across Malcolm's bed, with Malcolm's venom-laced spittle on Jamie's face, can safely be counted one. Malcolm is still sticky-taped to some clear fluid in a bag, and white with the effort of standing up unaided. In the background, Jamie can just hear _Russia Today_ starting on the top left of Malcolm's tellies. Malcolm's voice shakes with fury.

He promises Jamie to bury him so deep that, when Malcolm's great-great-grandnieces find him during a research trip on their personal solar-powered spacecraft, they'll stick a pole up his arse and exhibit him as Prehistoric Man, as opposed to just knocking up a card that says here lies Jamie Macdonald, the Motherwell bastard who could never make it with the big boys, a whiny lovesick little jessie who only got where he did by sucking Malcolm Tucker's cock.

Jamie says fuck off, I never loved you, before he can stop himself, and when he does manage to draw a breath, it's only to say fair's fair, Malcolm, you returned the favour often enough, I never loved you, and what was it you liked me to call you ? --

which is when Malcolm has his second heart attack.

***

During this last, explicit discussion of their extra-curricular relationship, Jamie has worked his way round the bed. Which is, at least, convenient: when Malcolm drops like a stone, Jamie's right there. He wraps both arms around him, sags onto the bed in order to support him at all, and in holding Malcolm close, forgets to mask his terror. Malcolm is wincing and clutching his right arm and it all seems much sharper, much more vivid than before. This is how Jamie's dad went, suddenly, horribly: when Jamie tries to reach past Malcolm for the call button, it's not where it should be and cannot be found fast enough and Jamie's arms shake and his lips shake against Malcolm's forehead and eventually he thinks to call out but feels a vice-like hand slap over his mouth.

Malcolm's lips are curled not with triumph, but disdain: Jamie's face, he knows, is still a mask of exactly how much losing Malcolm frightens him.

"You fucking idiot," the not-dead-man sneers, and his voice - although hateful - is clear. "Don't kid yourself about who's the lovesick idiot, son."

***

Jamie stays to hear Malcolm crow only because he can't make himself move. As Malcolm gloats, tugging the panic button out from under the pillow, and using it to order another Evian and a back issue of _Punch_ on which to write his Oscar speech, slow cold concrete continues to encase Jamie's limbs.

By the time he forces himself out of the room, he's starting to suspect the makings of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, all brought on by the Machiavellian dealings of the psychopath in the bed.

As Jamie heads back down the corridors, he thinks vaguely that he should call someone, but can't decide who, unless it's a contract killer. Life is so fucking ghastly that he's surprised not to see any statues weeping, blood running down the walls, the sun turning black or the ceiling rolled back as a scroll.

However, the imminence of the Apocalypse is confirmed when he sees a figure, raven-headed, rake-thin and wearing _that fucking trench coat_ strolling across the floor towards him. Her heels clatter on the lino.

She is the last person Jamie would ever want to see. An evil whisper in Downing Street claimed Malcolm had asked for her at the point of collapse, but Jamie had dimissed this as slander and spat in Julius's tea on the strength of it.

Her name, as Jamie cannot possibly forget, is Mary. She's Malcolm Tucker's wife.

Malcolm would rather spend his nights on pay-per-view than answer why he's still wearing her ring.

***

Nobody, not his stepdad, not his first girlfriend's second boyfriend, has ever merited hate from Jamie in quite the same way as Mary.

Even now, seeing her calm, hooded face (Malcolm had admired her self-containedness; it was yet another thing Jamie'd never managed, and the reason Malcolm occasionally had to have him followed) crossing the floor towards him, Jamie wants to swap her ears for her gallbladder. His memories of the ma-faced bitch - the terrible marriage, her fucking Simon fucking Hewitt, and the _care_ with which Malcolm safeguarded her subsequent privacy (and his own reputation, of course - but in hating Mary, Jamie's forgotten he hates Malcolm, and has thus recast the whole thing as the tragedy of the Wounded Husband) make him want to knock her down.

She's still elegant. Attractive. So much so that, even Jamie, who would happily traffick her all the way to Thailand if the ticket were definitively one-way, finds himself remembering (briefly) the time when she was quite a good laugh. But the memory's fleeting, replaced by what a bitch she is and how tall and how well-off, and if there's one thing Jamie hates, it's a tall posh bird who's slept with Malcolm. Once again, he's twenty years old with boiling blood.

"Fuck off," is his brief but comprehensive opener.

***

Mary left her husband more than once, but each time Malcolm negotiated a return. Jamie looks back on it now with a kind of historical awe: Malcolm was _so junior_ back then, to be able to repeatedly lose and regain his adulterous wife, without scandal. Every time Mary came back, Malcolm promised her more attention, and various kinds of fidelity Jamie was terrified Malcolm would manage. It was only giving up the priesthood that gave Jamie the time to get rid of her.

He managed in spectacular fashion. Jamie honestly prefers that memory, of Malcolm dry-mouthed and narcotic, to that of the Tuckers' wedding, the beginning of the horror.

Malcolm didn't invite him. That doesn't mean Jamie wasn't there.

 

Now, in the acid-smelling hospital corridor, Jamie finds himself spelling out the exact lengths he - _they_ \- have had to go to to keep Mary out of the press, exactly how many innocent journalists will be bled o death should she go near the hospital bedroom of a man who'd rather die than see her. Finally, he explains the personal persecution he will undertake should she try and contact Malcolm again. His projections are both plausible and creative.

***

By first light, Jamie's moved to a bench outside the mortuary. His granda was an undertaker, and he's always enjoyed watching the coffins go in and out, the comforting quiet of the funeral home. He used to find it calming. Jamie actually explained this to Malcolm once, during one of their two post-coital conversations in over a decade. Malcolm just looked appalled and demanded half his cigarette.

Now, the movements of the ambulances are a necessary distraction. Shivering in the half-light, Jamie's reflecting yet _again_ on the fall and fall of Glenn Cullen. His half-decent advisory abilities, dwarfed by the patheticness of tonguing a nonentity's arse.

The thought keeps him stiller and quieter than anything since seminary. He lets his reverie last until light has climbed to the top of the wall and Robyn rings, semi-shrieky, to say Nicola's daughter has missed her period and mentioned it on Facebook.

Something like elixir in his veins, Jamie stubs out his cigarette, squints up at an unprepossessing dawn, and heads back inside the hospital to broker the greatest peace treaty since Versailles.6

***

In the end, it's easier than they imagine. "I fucking saw off your ex-wife for you, you cunt" is all Jamie needs to make Malcolm shut up and take things seriously. Plus, Malcolm's expression  when he spots Jamie concedes a great deal. Luckily for them both, Sam has sent round a breakfast basket: as ever, she (even by proxy) has the best chance of making Malcolm act like a human being.

Over eggs benedict and SCAMPI CRISPS, they reach agreement. Malcolm wants it in writing, so Jamie has to go and borrow a pen from the nurse on duty. She doesn't follow politics but thinks the Scottish gays in Room 5 are charming. The Ten Point Plan runs as follows:

I. Malcolm will ring Jamie a maximum of _three times_ per day.

II. Malcolm will ring one Minister (selected in consultation with Jamie) every other day, giving him 48 hours to work up a bollocking that puts fear into the public servants and keeps him firmly in the loop (this is mostly to stop Malcolm going mad).

III. The PM will visit Malcolm in hospital every Friday. Jamie ~~will not will~~ won't sit in on those ~~meetings~~ visits.

IV. After he is discharged, Malcolm will stay quietly with his sister until the six weeks are finished. (This part of the treaty pleases both men enormously, implying as it does that both are reasonable human beings, but it's one to which they have no intention of sticking.)

V. Jamie will take over Sunday brunch duties with Tom and the family thereof, but Malcolm will still attend. And will cook the waffles.

VI. Anyone who fails to send Malcolm flowers while he's languishing will be added to the List.7

VII. Mannion's second lovechild will make her public debut two weeks before R[eturn]-day, creating a tidal wave of government advantage which Jamie can surf at ease, ensuring Malcolm doesn't have to hurry back from his convalescence.

VIII. Malcolm will ratify Jamie as Assistant Director of Communications ten weeks after he returns to office.

IX. Malcolm will NOT fucking die of a massive coronary fucking thrombosis, fuck you Michael Jackson, and, accordingly

X. Jamie will not _wank the fuck on_ about having to talk to That Bitch.

As Jamie picks up his coat and tie again, Malcolm watches him with something like affection. The nurses are piling in with his breakfast; the nurses, predictably, fucking _love_ him, party to none of the vitriol or contempt. Rolling his eyes at the sudden genesis of Charming Malcolm, Jamie leans back against the wall and waits for them to leave.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he tells Malcolm, refastening his tie. Malcolm blinks.

"You'll wait for a fucking invitation, that's what you'll do."

Jamie looks unfazed, slipping on his jacket. "I'll come whenever I please."

There's a flicker of a grin as Malcolm lifts the mug, murmurs against the rim. "Don't I fucking know it."

They grin properly, not looking at each other: Jamie tells him, affectionately, to fuck off, heads for the door, but is called back before he can touch the handle.

"No surrender, aye?" Malcolm asks, and glances up at Jamie with what is either the most unguarded or the most deceptive vulnerability the younger man has ever seen.

..as usual, whatever the motive, Malcolm's successful and Jamie sits back down on the bed, stomach twisting slightly at the wheeze Malcolm's chest makes. Jamie's not impressed to feel the chill in his skin, chafing Malcolm's cold fingers between his own until Malcolm yanks hard on Jamie's thumb and reads his wrist-watch.

"Jesus fuck, it's eight fucking fifteen, get over to the briefing and feed the pigeons their fucking bird _seed_. I want you to call me the second you've spoken to Fatty, his fat fucking ginger fucking Harrow drugs bust _gimp_ of a kid's got shares in the Communities thing in Watford. Oh, and on your way through, say something to Health about decent WiFi in Cardiology wards, they say if I check my fucking email half of ICU drops dead, that can't be right, can it?" Malcolm's eyes gleam, putative spin and subterfuge spiking his adrenaline levels.  "I might make something of this. All this sitting around in hospital, could call it an epiphany. Come back as Lentils Malcolm, all the way down the long white tunnel."

"Are you talking about coke?" asks Jamie dubiously, folding papers into his bag. "Because we took a very expensive injunction on that. And you did New Malc before, it only lasted as long as Steve Fleming's career and my refusing to fuck you."

Malcolm's grin recalls the shark. "Give me that biro, I've thought of point eleven."

Jamie leans in and kisses his lips. Malcolm frowns. So Jamie frowns too, and asks.

"What?"

"Watch yourself."

Jamie rolls his eyes. "Fucking delightful. I'll just be off to my ninety-fourth fuckday running your fucking office then, eh? I'll just staple my bloody balls to Tom's intray, while you lie back and eat your beta blockers. Try not to get any MRSA, that'd be fucking dreadful wouldn't it?"

"Jesus Christ, what's the matter now?"

Jamie puts his coat on. "Fuck you, Malcolm."

"Well, while we're on the subject, fuck _you_ very much, but, what? Stop behaving like some Merchant Ivory poof." Genuinely incredulous, Malcolm stares at him. "Do I have to go round _saying_ it every five minutes?"

Jamie stops dead, forces his shoulders down, and turns. Malcolm, sitting up in bed with sudden colour in his cheeks, is so desperate to antagonise him that Jamie's determined to stay.

Enthralled by the spectacle of Malcolm incriminating himself, Jamie folds his arms and leans against the wall. The 8.30 can throw itself off the Erskine Bridge while he waits.

Malcolm's always hated it when Jamie stares at him.

His cheeks are going red. "What? _What_? .....you'll miss the fucking briefing. They'll be running round the farmyard with their fucking heads off while you're standing around waiting to play _Love Story_."

"I thought they were pigeons."

"Pigeons. Fucking rats with wings, the lot of them. Fuck off."

Jamie just smiles at him. Malcolm replies with a look of undiluted loathing. 

"I'm not fucking saying it again." Jamie's smile becomes a grin, before he ducks to avoid the pillow Malcolm's chucked at his head. 

"...oh, just the fuck the fuck off and get on with ruining the country. And bring me a _pain aux raisins_ this evening."

Jamie looks beatific. "I'll call you about Childe Fatty once he's chafed his way up to DoSAC. Hope him and Fatty  take the lift at once."

The smirk returns quickly, but still, Jamie glimpses something like relief. "Stand Ben Swain underneath the shaft and that's three unsightly problems solved at once."

***

Things continue. A week is a long time in politics, and a longer one if Malcolm Tucker's in a hospital bed.

The world still revolves in strict adherence to Tucker's Law. There are the days when the Ministers astonish them with their deviousness or jaw-dropping stupidity, and there are the days when Malcolm wants nothing more than to stick a breadknife in the back of Jamie's skull. There are the days in Malcolm's recovery when he gets paranoid or angry or just so _bored_ that he greets Jamie dumping his briefcase with _all right, Joe Orton,_ as the prelude to a toxic row.

It does not escape Jamie that Malcolm's use of 'Joe Orton' to accuse him of infidelity means Malcolm's accepted they both have something to be unfaithful _to_.

There's the day Malcolm goes back to work, when Jamie privately kisses Susan Tucker in the kitchen and swears in a madman's sweat that he will personally lie down in traffic for her or call up Keith the Thief From Leith if she ever, _ever_ needs his assistance, now that she's restored her brother to the world of lying, cheating politics. Jamie counts the days that follow: the first day Jamie reduces Robyn Murdoch to tears, the first time he threatens to waterboard Julius Nicholson, the first time Dan Miller, fucking poof, gives Malcolm the evil bastard glad eye in a hand-woven suit. There's the first time Malcolm puts back his head and roars up a thirty-foot stairwell for the next Prime Minister of Great Britain to get off her phone and get back to fucking work.

Jamie is there for all of this. He's right behind Malcolm, right beside him; occasionally just in front, adding devotion to obsession and pugilistic fight. Malcolm can get Nicola Murray to 10 Downing Street whether or not her daughter's up the duff by an adolescent glue-sniffer wearing his baseball cap sideways, and he knows it. Loudly. Once again, Jamie sees them both as feared and as fearsome as any man could wish himself and his ice-eyed not-lover to be.

And throughout, Malcolm Tucker doesn't die of a massive coronary fucking thrombosis. Which, overall, makes Jamie's days pretty fucking fantastic.

 

1And Olly is forbidden to talk to Sam, a rule he's unwilling to break even if Malcolm _is_ potentially going to die.  
2Jamie doesn't want to acknowledge Sam. She's the only living person for whom Malcolm has cooked a meal or relinquished an aeroplane upgrade.  
3The latter.  
4A routine bollocking for which Jamie scarcely has the heart. Continuing the Hogwarts metaphor, that stringy git Reeder makes a disparaging and/or lewd reference to Maggie Smith as McGonagall. Maggie Smith was Jamie's nanna's godmother's next-door-neighbour's granddaughter, and as such the insult is personal and he reacts accordingly.  
5A title which Jamie gives himself only once during the course of the argument, and which seems to bring Malcolm closer to a second mini-coronary than anything else has done.  
6Which, as any historian knows, is not very difficult.  
7The List comprises his mother-in-law, Peter Mannion, Cal Richards, Steve Fleming, Dan Miller and Sam's boyfriend who lived off her salary and broke their lease in the June 2003.


End file.
